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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Catch those Joules

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When component or subsystem makers get their products designed-in to a prestige project, they like to make a fuss about it, in the hope that you, the designer, will be impressed and will also consider the product for your design. Conversely, if you are the owner of that project, you may want to keep that design-in quiet, in the hope that you can keep your rivals in the dark as to how you are getting the job done. The motor industry is particularly sensitive in this respect, and none more so than Formula One. If you deal with the teams of F1, normal commercial security and non-disclosure agreements escalate rapidly to the level of all-out raving paranoia, with agreements of the general form, “We agree to let you sell this component to us, but only if you agree never to mention the fact until the heat-death of the universe. Sign here, in blood (your own, of course) and kindly give us custody of your first-born as security.”
A certain amount of fun is therefore to be had around projects such as the energy recovery initiative. Next year’s F1 specification calls for a measure of energy recovery from braking, subsequently to be made available for acceleration. Fairly routine in city buses in several towns around the world, but not much applied to racing cars, as yet. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the outlines of how this might be done. Some sort of motor-generator in the power train, maybe one on each of the driven axles, a heap of FETs or IGBTs doing power switching, and some sort of energy store, most likely a supercapacitor bank. Simple in principle, but getting it to work under the transient load conditions (both electrical and mechanical) of an F1 car will be challenging.
So, at a show like the recent PCIM event (Power Control and Intelligent Motion) you might make some guesses as to who might be involved with such a development, and innocently ask them, “Can you tell me about your involvement with F1’s energy recovery project?” The responses tend to fall into two distinct categories. Either, “Sorry, don’t think we know anything about that,” or….a look of something approaching horror spreads across the marketing manager’s face and the reply is, “I’m not at liberty to discuss any such programme that we might or might not be involved with.”

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